Saturday, August 2, 2014

Siletz Bay Park

We continue to enjoy finding and exploring the 18 Lincoln City Parks
and Open Spaces as a way to escape the summer heat of the ninety degree plus
temperatures in the Willamette Valley. The thinking that went into yesterday’s
trip to the coast was that Friday would be the last day to avoid the extra
crowds before the weekend, and as low tide was at 10:00 AM, that would be the
time to be on a shoreline some place to take advantage of the exposed mud flats.
We put both of those ideas in place and arrived to an empty parking lot at Siletz
Bay Park around ten o’clock.

This small park is located at the mouth of Schooner Creek on
Siletz Bay, right off busy Highway 101. We wandered out on the mud flats of the
bay as far as we could, watching large numbers of crows, numerous gulls, and a
lone Caspian Tern.

We also took advantage of the low tide to walk under the
bridge of Highway 101 and up Schooner Creek a short ways where we watched this
Great Blue Heron fishing successfully. Numerous American Crows were upset with
our presence and with a fleeing River Otter.